bully

in the eighth grade, mr. abdullah
kicks me out of class for talking back
but i can’t help it. the etymology
of OK is *not* german,
and my name is not spelled
with Os and he is wrong, WRONG,
about the nature of mary’s relationship
with arthur, the zany hero
of our english language books.

arthur is hopeless, easily swayed
by mary’s beauty, too responsive
to her strategically deployed sentimentality.
this is not true love–he is her desperate
last resort and i have resorted
to sitting outside this classroom,
its windows open to the courtyard
and i fucking care about arthur and mary
like they matter.

we never recover, mr. abdullah and i.
when i see him years after he remembers
me, barely, as that student who would become
nothing but annoyance in most classrooms.

i mean to say, because i am in the habit
of speaking, that i came by it honestly,
that it has had its costs, both petty and dear.
that there is no lunch money reward,
no one doing my homework. that i’ve sat
outside many rooms, turning over in my mouth
the words i couldn’t stop from spilling.

i mean to say, because i am in the habit
of speaking, that i am tired of hearing
my own voice thrown back to me and distorted.
that i am tired of seeing my name,
misspelled and misspoken and manipulated
beyond recognition. that i am tired
for poor arthur, bumbling and baffled
and bribed with false affection.

for poor arthur,
who can’t say anything right.

the lust

If every Sunday were as productive as this one, I would totally wish for a week of Sundays. But then it would be like that short story about some kid who wishes for a week of Sundays, and by the end of the week, the family is eating leftovers in 7 day old church clothes, which is not a very good Sunday after all…but frankly, this is not dissimilar to most of my Sundays. Suck on that, moralizing fable.

/Study Date/
you are so handsome
in your tiny purple apartment
in your tiny purple shirt
making scrambled eggs in the morning
tilapia for dinner.

i peel the skin from this clementine,
pull back the peel on the banana:
what is innuendo when it’s blatant?
every time i use the bathroom
i see a box of condoms, begging.

across the table your face
such focus makes me distracted–
it’s the intensity that gets a girl.
i am only 3 feet away
from an unmade bed, begging.

how many more sundays like this?
i’d give you
every. single. one.

Day Two

Last night I discovered NaPoWriMo, which is the abbreviation for National Poetry Writing Month. This prompt is from their website: Write a poem that incorporates the titles of three books you have in your house.

/Library/
Between L4 and L5, my spine
is slipping. Against gravity I hold
this body up but my seams crack
so I fold each limb in like paper
until I am bound in my own borders.

—–
Uh. It turns out I’m bad at following prompts. Oh well. Also, since it’s been 6 years for your loss, and would have been 6 years of our gain, and it’s been so long…I miss you dear. I hope you’re well.

existential crisis, take two.

As an instructor I am many things: feminist in politics, casual in presentation, strict in policy, detailed in assignments, sometimes funny, sometimes flip, sometimes focused in discussion. I like to think that I’m a good teacher. I can summarize difficult arguments in brief and clear language. I try to make space for students who wouldn’t normally speak to be heard. Though it is cliche and sentimental, I genuinely believe something powerful can happen in the classroom. I believe that people change how they think, or begin to change how they think about the world. And I generally perceive that change for the better.

This week, I was something in my classroom that I have never explicitly been before. This week, I spoke to my students not as an informed and (inasmuch as possible, objective) instructor, but as a Palestinian who had lived under occupation; as someone who approached the topic from a specific political perspective, with ideas grounded in theory as much as feeling, and with definite opinions regarding action and change. I have never done this. I have never been a Palestinian first. While I am unclear on how to describe that position in concrete language, I suppose the closest I can say is that to my students I stood in for Palestine. For many, I was likely the only Palestinian they had seen in person, or with whom they could converse. For many, I was the only indication that something like Palestine existed, that it was populated by real people, and that it was under occupation.

I feel incredibly conflicted about holding this position. I was clear when I began my sections that I would be happy to pursue our regularly scheduled activity. I was clear that if this was undesirable or unproductive, we could move on. And while it was productive and interesting for many of my students, I could tell that one student in particular was not comfortable, was not OK. While I wouldn’t characterize her posture as hostile, I would say that it was defensive. Now, 24 hours later, I still can’t shake the feelings of vulnerability and anxiety I felt in the classroom. What a curious effect of oppression, that in acknowledging your own personhood, you might feel guilty. Guilty to take a “biased” position, guilty to claim space, guilty to make those who would support your oppression feel at all uncomfortable. I know that this guilt is obviously complicated by the fact that I am her instructor, and we exist in a relationship that is unequal. And while I prefaced and reiterated multiple times that I was speaking that day primarily as a person with a clear position, rather than facilitating discussion and underlining concepts with no position other than conveyor of course materials, I feel so…icky. Did I do something wrong? Was this the correct course of action? Should I have stuck to the lesson plan? Isn’t it OK sometimes to be honest, to be me, to be Palestinian? I know that neutrality is a farce. I know that even when I play instructor, my personhood and politics don’t disappear, but neither are they as explicit as they were yesterday. I am afraid that I have alienated her. I am afraid that I was too transparent. I am afraid that the room will be altered irrevocably after this. I am afraid of my anger at feeling afraid in the first place. I am afraid I am not cut out for this job. I am afraid that now that I have been a Palestinian first, I will not be able to lie to myself– I was one always, throughout all things. I am afraid to be Palestinian. I am afraid to be.

the HoJo diaries

The First Night
I started the drive hung-over. Not exactly. In the words of David Cross: I wasn’t that pleasant euphemism, hung over. I was FUCKED UP. And though I felt better about 3 hours in, by the time the drive was over, I was as dazed as I had been when I started. I have driven 11 or so hours, alone. Out of Michigan, across Ohio, across Pennsylvania, into New Jersey. I spent the last half hour in my car, circling the same few blocks over and over again, because my GPS, Susan, does not understand that in order to make a left turn, you have to go right first. In fairness, how could she know? I certainly didn’t. Or maybe she knew and wasn’t telling me. In either case, I shut her down and did it the old fashioned way, asking the kind woman at the Hyatt how to get to a “rival” hotel. I use scare quotes because the Howard Johnson of New Brunwick is the shadiest hotel at which I’ve ever stayed. Even at midnight, I feel skeevy about the stairwells, the outdoor carpets. The indoors aren’t much better. A sad, thin mattress; outlets that don’t have three prongs; a table that wobbles; a hair-dryer that doesn’t turn on; and oddly, a small veranda. At 65$ a night, I suppose I can’t complain but I do anyway, elaborate strings of profanity to the empty room.

What was I doing here? A conference. On affect. Of course. This is the problem with studying feeling: you can drive across the godforsaken terrain known as Ohio, and still not be far enough away. Like a storm cloud that travels with you, all the things I’d tried to suppress leaked out in spurts and before long I am crying again, the fourth time today. By now, the tears are less emphatic and overdone, sliding down my cheeks with little care: more habit than affect. I try to tame my sadness in the dim lights of the HoJo (how the hotel *actually* abbreviates itself); it becomes manageable. A small tightening around my heart only when I let my guard down, instead of an incessant squeezing. Spent, I collapse onto the bed but can’t stop thinking. I read the remainder of a Nora Roberts novel and finally fall asleep, uninterrupted until the morning.

Day One
The next morning, I take my time getting up. The HoJo fairs worse in the daylight. While clean, there is an unmistakable dinginess in the textiles, on the plastic basin of the tub and toilet. I make due, because there is nothing else to make. The hair dryer isn’t working, so I bend over the heater. I thread my computer cord from the bathroom, the only room with open outlets, let alone three prong, across the room to the table. I get dressed, put on makeup. I’m starting to get hungry, so I venture out to the conference site. I think I’ll park my car, and then walk around the campus, which will surely have coffee shops, sandwiches and the like. I am wrong. The Women’s studies complex on the Brunswich (a funny mistake I’m keeping), is in the middle of fucking nowhere, as far as I can tell. I walk around for an hour until I find a student center with an a la carte cafe. I eat outside, for the weather is perfect today, and revel in the rare feeling of accomplishment: I made it. I found food. Things will be OK.

The first day of the conference goes well: I learn that Rutgers is going to feed us for the rest of the conference, and am glad again that I made the decision to come. It also goes quickly, only one graduate student panel before the first keynote, David Eng. When Eng speaks, he is composed, comprehensive, elegant. He speaks about race and reparations, psychic and legal. I don’t pretend I understood everything, but I’m struck by his eloquence, optimism. When I get up the nerve to introduce myself the next day, he is charming in person as well. Graciously learning my name, gushing about how brilliant my advisor is. Turns out, theorists are people, too.

We end shortly after David’s talk, so I take my car back to the HoJo, getting lost for the last time in New Brunswich. When I get back to the hotel, I can’t bring myself to do actual schoolwork, so I read another Nora Roberts, the last in my latest trilogy, order a pizza, over-tip the driver and find comfort, unexpectedly in my isolation and solitude. Flushed from Eng’s brilliance, and transported temporarily to an Irish landscape of love in Robert’s, the lack of love, REAL love, is suppressed for another night.

Day Two
The conference starts unreasonably early. So from the outset, I’m already slammed, and the content and breadth of the day is no relief. There are 3 panels, 2 keynotes. One by Jasbir Puar, a second by Leo Bersani. At lunch I finally make friends, sitting on the shaded steps of the adjacent building. Bersani sits with us, and he easily becomes the most lovable, graceful, dapper surprise of the conference. He is frail and brilliant, thoughtful and kind. It’s hard to express how amazing he was, talking with me about my drive, Flint, movies. Straining to hear our conversations, picking at the well-worn hole in the elbow of his sweater, wiggling his toes in his chocolate suede loafers, which look like fancy house shoes. I’m so charmed by his demeanor, his wit.

The affects studied at the conference are mostly negative, while the atmosphere is convivial, collegiate. I find my mood wavers with each presentation, resulting mostly in sublimity. I am awed, humbled, stuttered into silence by the passion in the room, the brilliance of watching these virtuosos chit chat as though over Sunday brunch. After dinner, a beer, and small talk with my new friends, I return once again to the HoJo. This night, I stay up reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The night is Hitchcock, the hotel the perfect ambiance for reading Freud’s probing work. I might not buy into psychoanalysis, but that night my dreams are wild and vivid, felt in the fiber of my skin and I wake up tingling, out of breath–the taste of someone I just met on my lips. In dreams, I find the attachment I crave, my mouth muttering her name into hers, over and over.

Day Three
Is it an oxymoron to say it’s another beautiful day in Jersey? I’m being too cruel. Aside from the driving, Jersey has treated me well. Today, on this last day, the weather is perfect. The agenda is full, but less intense than the prior day. Two panels, followed by lunch, followed by Lauren Berlant’s keynote, and a concluding panel of the conference’s four major speakers, reflecting on what they learned, with what they hope to move forward. The vibe is, again, jovial and celebratory, due in small part, to the beer and wine brought out early. I couldn’t say what I’ve learned in these three days, so much volleying around my brain. I grapple as best as I can with the complexity, share a cigarette with my conference friend, have a last laugh with Leo. I have a sad sense of finality when he leaves the conference, wondering like my father would, I suppose, if he’ll make it much longer. He seemed so lightly tied to the earth, at odds with his brazen, defiant, wildly present writing.

I return to the HoJo with wry affection. My plans for the evening have fallen through, so I improvise: I’ll take a nap and get up and read Freud instead. My dreams are vivid again; I imagine in sleep that I am opening a door to a well-lit, buttery yellow kitchen, and when I pass through it my eyes open to the off-white popcorn ceiling. It’s dark out now, and the door to my veranda is cracked open. I swing it wide, take in the cool night air–prepare myself to again fill the hours, push away the tenderness in my chest cavity, muddle through the tedium. I echo Liz Grosz’s closing remarks, an idea that has saturated the presentations: every ontological project has an affective register. And the affective is neither about optimism or pessimism. It is simply making life livable. I promise myself I’ll remember this tomorrow, on my long long drive, out of New Brunswich, through Pennsylvania, through Ohio, into Michigan: all alone. I am not optimistic, but I can do this. Alone if needs be, I can live.

strange conditions

i’ve been apartment shopping. i have neither the time nor money to make a move at the particular moment, but the craigslist’s offerings are so enthusiastic: indoor pool! free parking! laundry on site! i move every year and this is the first time i’ll have lived in the same space for more than one. it’s nice not to pack up my things, recruit my brother to lift the heavy stuff, pay for a moving truck. still, i feel itchy and dissatisfied. i begin to resent the second bedroom, agonize over the screen doors, antagonize the cats. they’re bored here, too. on nights like this, and so many others, i long for my flint home. the comfort and capacity i feel there, the sense of self that’s so grounded, it can also feel like being buried (on a bad day). i wonder if i’ve made the right decision, moving here. if i should go back, or if this longing is just another way to distance myself from the things i don’t want a part of here, or perhaps don’t want a part of me.

the semester is starting, too, and with it all kinds of fresh promise. new classes, new professors, new friends, new work. i’ve been in school so long i can’t help but feel a heady rush about fall. i buy new clothes, admire pumpkins. i’m filled with ambition about my work: all the things i’ll learn, what i could accomplish. to my dismay, i find myself arrogant about my abilities, my intellect–wanting to prove it to other people, perhaps by taking more classes or saying just the right thing. this posturing is absurd, and frankly, i blame it on people who consistently comment on my competence, or my astuteness. i don’t want to disappoint. and i want to be liked. it really is like middle school all over again.

this weekend, i visited with a friend and we canned tomatoes at his parents’ house. amidst the roiling boil and slippery skins of tomatoes, his parents, who treat me like their own daughter, were asking about why my father left Palestine, why we returned to the US after moving back. what can i say? my father cares, too much, about our well-being. he tries, too hard, to give us everything. and he would sacrifice all to do it. so we moved. and then we moved again, because in his mind, this would keep us safe. eventually, this would make us happy. my father is proud of me these days, following his unfulfilled footsteps of higher learning. he can legitimately excuse my absence from his home because i attend school far enough away. when i moved back from ohio, my mother told me it would be better to stay there than come back if i wouldn’t live with them. they froze me out of the family for the better part of two years when i did come back, live alone.

sitting at my kitchen table now, in my lonely apartment, i don’t regret the choices to leave. it hurts to know how conditional love is, how it can be withdrawn for infractions minor and major in scope. it hurts to know how deeply i’ve internalized the desire to please, to help, to do something to counter the blame of my real and imagined failures. to compensate, always, for my shortcomings. maybe i could go someplace new, where no one knows me well enough to see those ugly things, where i can start over, try again to do it right, to make decisions and present a person that doesn’t cringe at herself so often. but i’m caught between my given and chosen families, my school and personal life–they all collapse into eachother so that i feel stuck, always supposed to be here and there at the same time, always neglecting something, giving not enough to everything. i feel myself peeling away, layer after layer of me sent to stand proxy. i stay, but the person i face is shrinking, hollowing, endlessly diminishing by halves. in practice, invisible; in theory, infinite.

no. i don’t regret leaving. but staying gets harder and harder.

song of herself

I rescued the bananas. They were so sad, sitting on the top of the garbage in my friends’ kitchen, tossed before their time, to accommodate their purchaser’s week long absence. I didn’t want to take them–I didn’t. Already beginning to turn brown, what could I do for them? Wait for the winter of their life, before resentfully forcing them into some banana muffin scenario. For now they sit coyly on my table, in a bowl I threw for the very purpose of housing fruit. The bananas tricked me, made me accountable and my guilt over their presence is disproportionately huge. I didn’t even buy them. Why should I care?

It’s been four weeks since my return to the States. Everything is my apartment is bananas: the books I bought for school but haven’t read; the rugs in the bathroom I keep forgetting to wash; the MacBook that taunts me with its light-up keyboard, begging to be put to better use than Facebook status updates.  I have sat down to write hundreds of times since coming back. I blink at the screen. I look at my nails. I eat a snack. I eat twenty. But there is no story to be told, and I learned my writing lessons well. What is the narrative arc? Who are the characters? It can’t just be a free-fall of feelings, an avalanche of emotion.

And then I chide myself, because I have *done* things since coming back. Surely I have. I drove 3 hours to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a gay resort. I baked muffins, crumb cakes, pies. I watched Eclipse, Jersey Shore. I clocked hours on my RA position. I caught up with some of the amazing, important women in my life. I mailed packages. I went to a party where five minutes into meeting her, a woman informed me of her support and affection for the IDF. But these things are unrelated, no consistent strand but the overbearing “I” of it all. So I decide to be less like myself, challenge myself to ignore my overly rational tendencies and do the opposite of the thing I think I should do. I go out when I want to stay home, I go to my favorite bar when I should work. I flirt with people who are vulnerable, I have sex with an old friend and enjoy it. I research publishing companies that work with creative non-fiction, and imagine ways to take a year off from graduate school.

And when I convince myself that perhaps I can be less like me, more like someone interesting, someone with a story, someone adventurous and lovable and unpredictable rather than reliable and boring,  I rescue the bananas. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Practical and unemotional, but it’s so like me, I hate it. I hate their stupid curved bodies in my beautiful round bowl, which previously housed Sour Patch kids and the cord for my external hard drive. Now that they are here, I can’t possibly turn away from them, let them rot without some kind of resolution. I owe them my time, attention, as I owe all things: the books, the rugs,  the blog, the friend, the graduate school.

And because in all of this, what I want most is for someone to rescue me, take me home, make me safe and loved and beautiful and wanted, I envy them even as I loathe them. And because I hate that I have wants and needs I can’t fulfill on my own, I will take care of the bananas and books. I will deny the wasteful desire to throw them out, the selfish desire to put off my life and my inevitable boring self for a little longer. I come back to me, indulgent but uninspired, efficient but exacting. Sure, I hate the bananas. But ultimately it’s me I can barely look at.

Clean Squeek

i love my apartment. the spacious dining room that doubles as study space; the color coded bookshelves; the double closets in the bedroom; the lamps i bought at TJMaxx; the quiet of the complex; the sun in the morning through the patio doors (that don’t actually lead to a patio-alas). i forget how lucky i am to have this serene, private space. i forget how much i love it until i spend significant time away from it. and i am always reminded when i come home. i am reminded when i clean it, and everything sparkles–looking almost as fresh and lovely as the day i moved in (remember, i have cats, so everything deteriorates eventually).

i cleaned it top to bottom today because i was having guests for a potluck. when i say top to bottom, i mean i actually vacuumed, dusted, and wiped down the bathroom. three tasks, that because i live alone, i feel no compulsion to do. and when i say potluck, i mean a hodgepodge dinner of egg rolls, spinach and artichoke dip with homemade bread, spinach salad with tahini sauce, and sour patch kids. for dessert i made an apple crumb pie, served warm with vanilla ice cream and cool whip. it was divine. there was also a nice selection of wines, and the company of fun friends, and DVRed episodes of Community. yes. i am lucky for the apartment, the means that allow me to live as i do, the cool people in my life.

so why the melancholy? the end of the semester left a big gap, but i should enjoy it. it should feel like breathing room instead of existential crisis. i woke up today ready to work. well, my brain did. my body went back to bed until noon. lucky, still. tomorrow i’ll try again. and if i fail, there is still the apartment, the DVR, the people. the research certainly isn’t going anywhere.

Mother of Pearl

oh WordPress. i wanted to be better. i wanted to post once a week, and then graduate school semester deux hit me like a chuck norris roundhouse to the face and here i am, 5 months since my last confession. apparently, blogging is like catholic church.

what can i say? it’s been…5 months. since we last spoke, i completed my first year of my PhD. i don’t feel different, unless more tired is a thing. i need a new bookshelf. SURPRISE. i spend half my life in Ikea, buying bookshelves, and kitchen canisters i can’t possibly need. i spend the other half assembling those bookshelves, and stuffing them with kitchen canisters. artistically. i am simultaneously over and under whelmed. overwhelmed by the quantity of work i have to do. underwhelmed by myself, and what i consider my strengths. i sometimes feel that  i have the depth of a petri dish and none of the complexity. le sigh. this is what graduate school ultimately teaches: mediocrity.

the summer promises more of the same, but a more subtle pace. i’ll be doing research for a couple of my profs starting tomorrow. and in june i’ll be traveling to Palestine for the first time in 10 years. i’ll stay there for a month, which produces what some people refer to as a “buttload” of anxiety. because it’s been 10 years. because i don’t know what i’ll feel when i’m in that place again. i don’t know how that place will feel about me. the fatness. and the singleness. and the detachment i’ve carefully cultivated for reasons i can’t quite articulate.  and the people. and the borders. and the visas. and jerusalem. and falafel. actually, i’m pretty sure how i’ll feel about falafel. we are going to get down.

so i meant to post about my mother. i meant to talk about all the different ways i love her. and the different ways she loves me that make me better. and the ways she loves me that make me worse, and how those things make it harder to remember the former. instead let me say my mother is grace and beauty. she is strength and courage, sacrifice disguised as selfish. she is maddening, complicated, confusing.  at the same time, transparent in her desire for goodness, for better things, for bigger safer happier dreams. she grounds us and without her i imagine we would flail helplessly. she makes the best food. her hands are divine. her face is…breathtaking. she giggles. she calls me “ya stupid”. she likes to Wii Golf. she will return a gift she doesn’t like, and tell you to your face.  sometimes she listens without hearing. sometimes she speaks without talking. she taught me to be proud. she taught me guilt and shame. she teaches me, still. she gave me life. she gives it still.